RuneQuest 6th Edition

Created in 1978 by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney and friends, RuneQuest is the classic roleplaying game of fantastic adventure with heroes and magic.

Now in a brand new edition, RuneQuest is updated and expanded by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker. Everything you need for fabulous roleplaying adventure is contained in a single volume that has been designed to support any genre of fantasy. The game retains all the key concepts and hallmarks of its earlier versions, but requires no familiarity with the previous editions.

In RuneQuest your characters are defined by their culture, career, community, background, comrades, skills, magic and cults. Progression is through skill advancement – not levels or similarly abstract concepts. As your characters adventure and quest, their capabilities improve and their relationships deepen and strengthen. Players and Games Masters have complete flexibility over what can be achieved, and the way characters develop is entirely dependent on choices players make, depending on their characters’ aspirations and motivations.

Games Masters receive a huge amount of support through the RuneQuest rules. All the concepts and game mechanics are explained clearly with options and considerations explored and presented for ease of use. You need only this rulebook for many years of exciting and imaginative play.

What’s in this book?

RuneQuest contains everything needed for play:

Character Creation – building your character through the familiar characteristics, through developing culture and community relationships, choosing a career, and gaining basic equipment according to social class.

Skills – What they do, how they work, and how to handle many different circumstances (degrees of difficulty, critical and fumbled rolls, opposed skills, group skills, and so on).

Economics and Equipment – Arms and armour, tools, clothing, accommodation... everything your character needs as he or she begins on their life of adventure.

Combat – RuneQuest’s combat system is unique, dynamic and geared towards adventurous realism. Gaining success over an opponent generates Special Effects that can rapidly turn the course of a fight. Copious advice is presented on balancing combat skills and styles, through to handling rabble and underlings.

Magic – No less than five very different forms of magic are presented and explored, with complete lists of spells and effects. How magic is defined and used in different fantasy settings and campaign worlds is examined in detail. The Runes, what the represent and how they work, is clearly presented.

Cults and Brotherhoods – Religious, magical and secular organisations, as well as other kinds of societies are detailed the Cults and Brotherhoods rules. Cults have been an important and traditional part of RuneQuest, and they are covered in significant detail along with templates for many different kinds of cult, order, school and so on for Games Masters and Players to build upon for their own campaigns.

Creatures - Over 50 creatures are fully detailed, including several non-human player character races. This chapter also offers complete guidance on how to use creatures effectively in RuneQuest games, and notes on how to design your own.

Games Mastery – Copious notes, thoughts and guidance on how to Games Master RuneQuest games. Areas for consideration are summarised, options explored, and different ways of using the rules offered. An invaluable chapter for new and old RuneQuest Games Masters alike…

Anathaym’s Saga – Numerous examples of play and how the rules are used are provided through Anathaym’s Saga. Follow Anathaym, her sister Kara, Mju the Mystic and Kratos the Sorcerer as the RuneQuest rules are illustrated and explained.

I picked this up after getting the Essentials version. It's not often that I can pick up a free version that fits the bill for 3 campaigns I had in my head, and then decide that I need the full version at $25 (pdf) RQ6 is a great system. RQ is old, [...]

Like most early RPGs, Runequest was originally developed because someone was unhappy with parts of D&D. Originally it was pretty closely tied to Glorantha, but this edition has decoupled itself and is a more generic fantasy system, though a lot of Glorant [...]

Almost certainly the best-written, best-organized core rpg rulebook I've seen in 20+ years of gaming. While not a lot of support material currently exists for RQ6 -- as of this writing -- the transparent nature of the underlying Basic Roleplaying (BRP) [...]

I had played RQ2, RQ3, RQ: AiG, and my current Glorantha campaign uses Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying. The two versions of RuneQuest produced by Mongoose were intriguing, but they seemed out of sync with my expectations. I knew that RQ6 was going to be [...]

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